Catfish :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews

Saw this at my favourite fleapit (The Cameo, in Edinburgh) the other night:

Here’s one way to look at “Catfish.” Some filmmakers in New York City, who think they’re way cool, get taken apart by a ordinary family in Ishpeming, Mich. You can also view it as a cautionary tale about living your emotional life on the Internet. Or possibly the whole thing is a hoax. At Sundance 2010, the filmmakers were given a severe cross-examination and protested their innocence, and indeed everyone in the film is exactly as the film portrays them.

To go into detail about that statement would involve spoiling the film’s effect for you. I won’t do that, because the effect is rather lovely. There’s a point when you may think you know what I’m referring to, but you can’t appreciate it until closer to end. The facts in the film are slippery, but the revelation of a human personality is surprisingly moving.

It is a cautionary tale, of sorts. But it also tells us something fundamental about human empathy; in certain situations there’s no room for anger, only forgiveness. It makes a great complement to David Fincher’s The Social Network from earlier in the year.

Nick Denton, Gawker Media, and journalism’s future : The New Yorker

Another day, another profile of a new media mogul:

There exists in the collective media mind a caricature of Denton as an evil, soulless, Machiavellian puppeteer: the Wizard of Blogs. It is fed in part by some of the familiar pejoratives associated with tech geekery (Denton as anti-social robot, for example), and also by his own publications, which, in the interest of his vaunted transparency, occasionally turn their pitiless gaze on the boss himself, for comic effect. From reading Gawker, I had learned that Denton is not just a terrible employer but one of “New York’s worst,” as well as an unapologetic liar and the kind of person who leaves his own party early in search of a better one. The caricature was not much diminished by speaking to people about their experiences with the man.

It’s interesting to see the mainstream press try to understand these characters, and to engage with them, but already a stereotype is becoming entrenched: the idiot-savant whose selfish behaviour is entirely contrary to to the “social” part of social media. The quote above simultaneously questions that stereotype and reinforces it.

Mad Men Reading List | The New York Public Library

Wowowowowow. The New York Public Library has compiled a reading list of books which were directly referenced in Mad Men, and it’s updated on a regular basis. The list so far:

Meditations in an Emergency - Frank O’Hara
The Best of Everything - Rona Jaffe
Confessions of an Advertising Man - David Ogilvy
Babylon Revisited and Other Stories - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword - Ruth Benedict
Exodus - Leon Uris
Ship of Fools - Katherine Ann Porter
Lady Chatterley’s Lover - D.H. Lawrence
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
The Agony and the Ecstasy - Irving Stone
The Group - Mary Mccarthy
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon

Each of these links go directly to the library’s online catalogue, so readers can see how many copies of the book are available to borrow, and put a hold on it for themselves. How’s about that for engaging with your customers?

Getting Made The Scorsese Way: Movies + TV: GQ

An oral history of Goodfellas, twenty years on, with contributions from cast, crew and a handful of admirers. Here’s one discussion, among many, about a key sequence:

David Chase (creator, The Sopranos): The sequence in GoodFellas — moving the cocaine, making the Sunday gravy, and taking care of the brother in the wheelchair, and dodging helicopters — the way music and film are used there, so that you actually feel you’re high on coke? I don’t think anybody’s ever done that before or since. It’s beautiful filmmaking.

Kevin Corrigan (Michael Hill): He samples like fifty different pieces of music in a minute. George Harrison and the Rolling Stones. Muddy Waters. The Who.

Christopher Brooks (music editor): Ooh, that was an expensive scene.

Spike Lee (director): He’s one of the few people who knows how to match music and picture. It’s not just about taking a great record and just slapping it up in there. That scene is directed, obviously, by someone who’s used cocaine! Simple as that. And used it a lot. And if you’ve never tried cocaine, which I haven’t, now I know what it feels like, after watching that scene.

As far back I can remember, I always wanted to be a… blogger. Hmmm, doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

BBC - Adam Curtis Blog: MADISON AVENUE

Adam Curtis talks about advertising, Madison Avenue and the Sixties:

The widespread fascination with the Mad Men series is far more than just simple nostalgia. It is about how we feel about ourselves and our society today.

In Mad Men we watch a group of people who live in a prosperous society that offers happiness and order like never before in history and yet are full of anxiety and unease. They feel there is something more, something beyond. And they feel stuck.

I think we are fascinated because we have a lurking feeling that we are living in a very similar time. A time that, despite all the great forces of history whirling around in the world outside, somehow feels stuck. And above all has no real vision of the future.

And as we watch the group of characters from 50 years ago, we get reassurance because we know that they are on the edge of a vast change that will transform their world and lead them out of their stifling technocratic order and back into the giant onrush of history.

The question is whether we might be at a similar point, waiting for something to happen. But we have no idea what it is going to be.

He also shares some archive footage and profiles key personalities from the era. Simply fascinating.